Would this be considered keyword spamming?

[Stereo Steve]

We sell a lot of products by certain manufacturers and, as part of our SEO push, we are trying to get a lot more descriptive comment onto each product page.

One idea was to have fields for each product like Manufacturer, Media type etc with a description. So, we might have some set text for Panasonic as a manufacturer and copy that into all the product pages for panasonic products. If it's blank media, we might have a 'media type' field which may have a detailed description of the media type and its properties.

My question is, considering this same text is likely to appear on many pages (we might have 40 or so panasonic products) is google going to not like it?

[leehack]

If you are doing:

Manufacturer: Panasonic
Media Type: DVD
Capacity: 700mb

and not doing:

Manufacturer: Panasonic media company, have you seen this companies media, it's the greatest media of all the media ive seen in the world of media

Media Type: DVD, yes a round dvd, much like a cd, but definitely a dvd

Capacity: 700mb, 700 megabytes of capacity, 700 mega bytes

Short rule of thumb, if its going to benefit the user then do it, if its sort of for the user and you are not sure the search engines will like it - then dont do it.

As you are doing the seo currently, you could always do one product per page also. You could also set variables to save typing or copy pasting continuously. You could even have Panasonic layouts, Sony layouts etc, with the text already in the layout. One change to the template and you've adjusted the whole site then very easily.

[jont]

Single products per page (section) is not a panacea for fantastic listings if the product text is thin on the ground.

I have hard evidence to recommend if listing lots of very similar items with thin to no text then to place these into the same section and not spread onto a single page (section).

[leehack]

I have hard evidence to recommend if listing lots of very similar items with thin to no text then to place these into the same section and not spread onto a single page (section).

Totally agree, spares listings are a typical example, part number, part name, image and price should never be on their own.

Whereas a Panasonic CD/DVD rewriter with 30 lines of text, plus specifications and 3 images could work this way.

I find the decision is often based on how much info you have on a product and how good will this product sell.

[Stereo Steve]

OK, so generally a no no. One thing I did consider is that I could have a 'more' icon beside each variable whihc would open up a small window with a long description of that variable.

So it might look like (obviously prettier and better concieved than this)

Brand: Panasonic (more)
Type: DVD-R (more)
Size 4.7GB (more)

The more would be a button or something like the help buttons you often see on forms. It would open a small window with some text about panasonic.

The whole idea of this is not to create content for SEO but to improve the customer experience without ruining the SEO performance. I just thought that if each product (blank media discs do not have a vast amount of differences in general) had huge amounts of text on each page, then a lot of it would be very much the same and repeated over and over on the site.

We do use product per page but it's generally so that we can offer more options like related items, extra info, bulk purchase options without cluttering the main product pages.

Thanks for your thoughts so far.

[george]

As a customer, its a bit off putting to find a site that is saturated for SEO, especially with loads of links crammed in, text style, in paragraph fashion, at the bottom of a page.

And, arguably more importantly, but often ignored, once you have that customer, you don't want to put them off do you?